


Ekona

by AllegoriesInMediasRes



Series: Mahabharata fics [8]
Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Oneshot, Tumblr fills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 06:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15902535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/pseuds/AllegoriesInMediasRes
Summary: Three promises Draupadi broke and one she did not.ekona (Sanskrit): less by one





	Ekona

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avani/gifts).



**Three promises she broke and one she did not**

She spends hours gazing into fires -- cooking fires, hearth fires, holy fires -- as a child. It unnerves her father, all her stepmothers, her nurses, and just about everyone she meets. Only Shikandhi does not reprimand, instead showing a quiet understanding and shared appreciation of fire that Draupadi will understand only years later. And Krishna, of course, approves in that mocking, mysterious way of his.

But Dhri -- her twin, who held her hand as she stumbled into the world, who was born out of the same blaze -- she would have expected to understand her as intimately as though they were of one mind. But he looks at her, eyes unsettled, and begs her not to regard it as a second mother. It is only spark and tinder, not the holy flames of vengeance that brought them into existence. Nothing good can come of her obsession, he cautions.

Krishnaa looks at him solemnly and says, “Yes, brother.”

~

Sutasoma will not stop irritating Prativindhya and Suthanu by repeating jokes, long after everyone has stopped laughing at them. And here Draupadi had thought she would enjoy her children being old enough to talk intelligently. But Sutasoma has apparently inherited his father’s capacity for bluster, and not yet learned to temper it. She finally warns him that if he does not stop annoying his elder siblings, she will tie him to a pillar and gag his mouth. 

“Even your Uncle Krishna was tied to a pestle in his younger days.”

Sutasoma is briefly apologetic, before he perks up. “But did you know if you swathe a tiger in widow’s  white, you get --”

Draupadi does not tie him up.

Kunti beats her to it.

~

Indraprastha is largely a land of widows, after. It is the perfect maelstrom for unscrupulous men to turn up on their doorstep, claiming to be distant relatives and therefore the right to control the remaining family fortune. More and more women find themselves slaves in their own homes, and sometimes turned out onto the streets with nothing but the clothes on their back and the starving children in their arms. Miserably, desperately, they seek justice at the Empress’s feet.

Panchali looks at them sorrowfully. “I, too, have been stripped of my dignity in this very city. I have thrown myself at the feet of a queen -- and more than one king -- and found myself rebuffed. I swear that I shall ensure that perhaps even one woman does not find herself used so.”

By the time the second Panchaganga since Kurukshetra rolls around, not one woman in Indraprastha, widow or not, finds herself at the mercy of poverty. 

~

Five times she walks seven times around the fire, and each time she vows, “Where you go, I go,” and that much at least always proves to be true. 

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt from Avani (@avani008) on Tumblr. “Panchaganga” means the Hindu new year.


End file.
